Prosecutors said Matthew Whisman was beaten, injected with fentanyl and thrown off a bridge after he was suspected of helping investigators in a Maryland shooting case.
LANCASTER, Pa. — A Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to 43 to 100 years in prison in the killing of a 25-year-old Lancaster County man whose body was later found in Maryland, closing one part of a case prosecutors say began as retaliation for cooperating with police.
The sentence matters now because it marks the first major courtroom outcome in a case that stretched across two states, began with a missing-person investigation and ended with homicide charges against three people. Prosecutors say Steven Scott Gaddis targeted Matthew Scott Whisman after learning he had been communicating with investigators about a non-fatal shooting in Maryland. While Gaddis has now been sentenced, two co-defendants still face pending cases, leaving the broader prosecution unfinished.
Judge Thomas Sponaugle imposed the sentence last week in Lancaster County after Gaddis, 28, of Pocopson Township, pleaded guilty days before trial to conspiracy to commit third-degree murder, aggravated assault, kidnapping and intimidating a witness. Prosecutors said the killing happened the night of April 3, 2024, inside a home in the 1100 block of Lancaster Pike in East Drumore Township. According to the charging record and later court summaries, Gaddis had gone through Whisman’s phone and saw messages showing that Whisman had been in contact with law enforcement about a January 2024 shooting at a residence in Rising Sun, Maryland. That discovery, investigators said, set off the violence. Gaddis, along with Whisman’s cousins Jeremy Absher and Alexander Whisman, assaulted Whisman inside the house, then forced him into a vehicle. Once inside, prosecutors said, he was injected with a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Local reporting based on court records added some of the most disturbing details. According to those reports, Matthew Whisman was beaten in a bathroom-laundry area and forced to shower before he was taken to a basement, where he was eating when Gaddis stood over him and said, “How would you feel if it’s your last supper?” The remark later gave the case some of its most memorable language, but prosecutors relied on a wider set of evidence than that quote alone. The district attorney’s office said Gaddis and Absher then threw Whisman’s body off a bridge, and his remains were found months later near a hiking trail in Cecil County, Maryland. Maryland authorities said skeletal remains discovered along Conowingo Creek in August 2024 were identified in October as those of Matthew Whisman, who had been missing since April. Investigators said he had been seen being taken from the Lancaster Pike address against his will.
The public record also shows how slowly the case came into focus. Police did not move directly from the killing to the recovery of the body. Instead, the search appears to have widened after Whisman’s mother told Pennsylvania State Police in July that she had not heard from him in months. By October, three suspects had been publicly identified: Gaddis, then 27; Absher, 25; and Alexander Whisman, then a juvenile. Prosecutors charged all three with 11 offenses, including murder, kidnapping to facilitate a felony, intimidation of a witness, drug delivery resulting in death, recklessly endangering another person and abuse of corpse. In December 2024, all three waived preliminary hearings, sending the cases to the Court of Common Pleas. Court records described the killing not as a sudden fight but as a deliberate attack tied to fear that Whisman would help law enforcement in the Maryland case. That witness-retaliation element turned the case into more than a homicide file. It became, in prosecutors’ telling, an effort to silence someone before he could speak further to police.
At sentencing, prosecutors paired that account with a statement from Whisman’s mother. First Deputy Assistant District Attorney Cody Wade read her words in court, and she told Gaddis that he had stolen her chance to watch her son grow older and rebuild family ties. “There will always be a hole in our family,” she wrote. The district attorney’s office said Wade prosecuted the case with Assistant District Attorney Samantha Frost. The same sentencing announcement also noted that Gaddis pleaded guilty in a separate April 2024 case involving gunfire into a residence in Quarryville Borough. Prosecutors said three juveniles were inside that home but were not injured. That separate conviction did not change the facts of Matthew Whisman’s death, but it broadened the picture the court had before it when Sponaugle decided the punishment. It also showed that the homicide case had unfolded alongside another violent case already tied to Gaddis.
What remains unresolved is the path for the two other defendants. Prosecutors have said prosecution is still pending against Absher, 26, and Alexander Whisman, now 19, and both remain presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. Earlier court records showed that Gaddis and Absher were accused of disposing of the body, while all three were accused of the assault, kidnapping and fatal drug injection. Public reporting this week said Absher’s next court date is April 23, while no trial date had been publicly set for Alexander Whisman. Those cases could still test parts of the evidence that Gaddis no longer disputes because of his guilty plea. They may also answer questions that remain only partly explained in public documents, including the full sequence inside the house, the role each defendant allegedly played and what additional witness testimony prosecutors expect to use if the remaining cases go to trial.
The setting of the case has also shaped how it has been understood locally. East Drumore Township sits in southern Lancaster County near the Maryland line, and the route from the house on Lancaster Pike to the place where the remains were later found is not a distant one. The case moved through ordinary local places: a farmhouse address, a county courtroom, a creek bank near a trail. That geography gave the story a grim intimacy. A man from the area disappeared, months passed with little public clarity, and then a cross-border investigation connected a Lancaster County beating to human remains found downstream in Maryland. By the time Gaddis was sentenced, the case had become one of the county’s most disturbing recent homicide prosecutions, not only because of the brutality alleged by investigators but because it centered on the killing of someone prosecutors say was helping police.
As of April 2, Gaddis had been sentenced to 43 to 100 years in state prison, and the cases against Absher and Alexander Whisman were still active. The next visible milestone is Absher’s scheduled April 23 court date as prosecutors continue to work through the remaining charges.
Author note: Last updated April 2, 2026.